Towards A Science of Gnosis

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Cosmic Dervish
Shahna Lax, 2004
31.5" x 17.75"
Etched copper with fretwork exposed to acid rain;
framed in rough fir
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Towards A Science of Gnosis:
Intimations of An Imaginal Theory of Knowledge
Kiley Laughlin
Abstract
The publication of The Red Book (2009) has provided a better appreciation of
C.G. Jung’s use of the imagination while exploring the unconscious. The imagination seems to have its own way of knowing that informs Jung’s active imagination, Henry Corbin’s mundus imaginalis, and the Islamic notion of ta’wil.
Jung’s notion of a collective unconscious coincides in a number of ways with the
mundus imaginalis. Corbin’s rendering of the mundus imaginalis and Jung’s collective unconscious seem to intimate a return to the root metaphors of human
experience. All of these ideas suggest that image is essential to the formation of
knowledge.
Key Words
Gnosis, mundus imaginalis, ta’wil, active imagination,
collective unconscious, epistemology
Introduction
The primary goal of this essay is to examine and compare the Islamic idea
of ta'wil and C.G. Jung’s active imagination method as alternative ways of
knowing. Furthermore, I deemed it necessary to explore a number of
other ideas associated with the works of both the C.G. Jung and scholar
of religious history Henry Corbin, so as to amplify the main topics of this
essay, which are as follows:
_______________________________
Kiley Q. Laughlin has done his studies in depth psychology and archetypal
psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. He is a U.S. Army Reserve officer
who works part time as a Military Intelligence officer in San Francisco, California. He is deeply interested the work of C.G. Jung, Henry Corbin, and James
Hillman. Address: 9275 Joines Road, Marysville, CA 95901. Email: kiley.laughlin@my.pacifica.edu.
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Henry Corbin's mundus imaginalis, Jung's confrontation with the unconscious and active imagination as ta'wil. Lastly, I will conclude the essay by providing commentary on the idea of gnosis and its relationship to
the archetypal imagination.
Two topics of interest—Jung's confrontation with the unconscious
and Corbin's mundus imaginalis—in particular warrant some introductory remarks. While discussing Jung's confrontation with the unconscious I am referring to the series of psychological experiences he recorded in The Red Book (2009) and chapter six of his autobiography. For
Corbin's idea of a mundus imaginalis I rely heavily on material drawn
from his essay of the same name (1972). In that essay, Corbin defined the
mundus imaginalis as a mode of perception and an order of reality associated with what Muslim mystics designated as the “eighth climate.”
Corbin intentionally chose the Latin term mundus imaginalis in order to
distinguish it from the imaginary, a word that people too often associate
with the unreal. Corbin extrapolated the idea of the mundus imaginalis
from the Arabic word alam al-mithal which translates as “the world of the
image.” In this context, the term image is intended to convey a more general understanding and does not denote a pure visual experience but subsumes a wide range of psychosomatic and suprasensory states.
The collective unconscious, in my own words, can best be understood as a psychic repository of the basic patterns of human experience.
Jung defined the concept several times throughout his work and I have
selected the following definitions as the most apropos given the scope of
this paper. According to Jung:
The concept of the unconscious is for me an exclusively psychological
concept, and not a philosophical concept in the metaphysical sense. In
my view, the unconscious is a psychological boundary-concept which
covers all those psychic contents or processes which are not conscious, i.e., not related to the ego in a perceptible way. (1923/1959, p.
283)
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And also
The collective unconscious is a part of the psyche which can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that it
does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal experience and
consequently is not a personal acquisition. (1936/1959, CW9i, para.
88)
Jung did not invent the idea of a collective unconscious but reformulated the idea into a depth psychological theory. The idea of a collective soul at the time was not a novel one and its history can be traced
back to a number of philosophies and cultural movements to include
eighteenth century Romanticism, the Renaissance, and Neo-Platonism.
In fact, Jung accredited the ideas of Carl Gustav Carus and Eduard Von
Hartmann as central to his own rendering of the unconscious
(Shamdasani, 2003, p. 165). The philosophy of Immanuel Kant also significantly influenced Jung's notion of an a priori unconscious and he
equated it with Kant's idea of a negative borderline concept (i.e., thing-initself), that is to say, something that does not physically exist but nonetheless can be indirectly inferred as a result of objectifying psychological
experience (Jung as cited in Shamdasani, p. 237). It was this aspect of
Jung's conceptual hypothesis that led him to view the unconscious as 1)
distinct from consciousness, and 2) autonomous. Thus, an understanding
of these main theoretical points of Jung's concept of an unconscious is
essential while discussing his confrontation episode.
Henry Corbin's Mundus Imaginalis
Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was educated in philosophy at the Catholic
Institute in Paris. Corbin began his career as a scholar at the National
Library in 1929 where he met Louis Massignon. Massignon, a French
scholar of Islam, introduced Corbin to the works of the Muslim mystic
and founder of Illuminationist philosophy Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi
(1155-1191). Suhrawardi's writings, in the tradition of the Persian scholar Ibn Sina (Avicenna), played an essential role in Corbin's postulate of
the mundus imaginalis. Henry Corbin was a frequent lecturer at the Eranos conferences in Ascona, Switzerland, having first attended the annual
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conference in 1949. He returned to lecture there nearly every year until
his death in 1978 (Cheetham). During his time at Eranos, Corbin collaborated with Jung and thus it is not surprising that we see a Jungian influence in Corbin’s work during his middle years.
As noted, Corbin did not coin the term mundus imaginalis but abstracted it from the collected works of a long line of Muslim neo-Platonic
visionaries to include Avicenna, Suhrawardi, and Mullah Sadra. Not only
did Corbin believe the mundus imaginalis was a credible idea but was
convinced that it was ontologically real. In other words, the mundus imaginalis had a genuine mode of existence and its own topology of being. For
Corbin, the mundus imaginalis was not a concrete thing or place but rather a perspective, that is to say, a way of seeing things. Like Jung, Corbin
recognized that reality was not limited to merely what one could tangibly
see or touch, but penetrated the totality of one’s being. To gain access to
the mundus imaginalis, one first required an appropriate orientation to
esoteric hermeneutics or what is known as ta'wil in Islam, which I will
further explore later.
One can also discern a clear influence of Corbin’s ideas in James Hillman’s archetypal psychology which should come as no surprise since
Hillman named Henry Corbin “The second immediate father of archetypal psychology” (1983, p. 11). Corbin maintained that the mundus imaginalis, as originally conceived by Islamic thinkers, was a phenomenon sui
generis grounded in the real world. Corbin explained why he selected the
term:
Hence I needed to find a good equivalent for the Arabic term 'alm
al-mithal. It would have to designate a world, a mode of being and
knowledge which are at the level of the imagination, yet which are
far from unreal, since they have a perfect right to be considered as
real, as part of a reality sui generis. The term mundus imaginalis is
exactly equivalent as Arabic ‘alm al-mithal. (1998, p. 166)
Furthermore, Corbin, having specialized in Muslim Shi'ite doctrine,
highlighted suggestive parallels between Jung's archetypal reality and Islam's notion of an imaginal reality populated by of ontologically real beings. According to Hillman
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The mundus imaginalis offers an ontological mode of locating the
archetypes of the psyche as the fundamental structures of the imagination or a fundamentally imaginative phenomena that are transcendent to the world of sense in their value if not their appearance.
(1983, p. 12)
Corbin frequently employed technical terms ostensibly gleaned from
Jung's lexicon like archetype which refers to humankind’s inherited
modes of psychic functioning.
Jung's Confrontation with the Unconscious
As early as 1913 Jung began to document a series of personal experiences
that he would later call his “confrontation with the unconscious” (1961,
pp. 170-199). According to Jung, the images arose from his unconscious
and were not merely products of his imagination but demonstrated psychic objectivity (1961, p. 183). Jung subsequently attributed significant
value to that period of his life:
The years, of which I have spoken to you, when I pursued the inner
images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is
to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details
hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what
had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and
material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely
the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration
into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything,
was then. (2009, p. VII)
It was during those years (1913-1916) that Jung discovered what he
would later name active imagination. Therefore, one could say that Jung
arrived at his active imagination method as a result of those formative
years when he confronted his unconscious and assigned meaning and
value to its images.
The main reason I have included a topical section on Jung's confrontation with the unconscious is due to its phenomenological similarity
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with Corbin's description of visionary experiences in the mundus imaginalis. Does The Red Book document Jung's exploration of the mundus
imaginalis? All things being equal, I think that one could argue that there is
sufficient anecdotal evidence, which I will later allude to, to suggest that
Jung’s confrontation episode was on par with other visionary ontologies
such as the mundus imaginalis. To be clear, I cannot prove that Jung's
confrontation with the unconscious was another subjective representation of the mundus imaginalis. I can only posit its possibility by comparing Jung’s written account with the documented experiences of other visionary thinkers. In this way, it is difficult to diagnose Jung’s confrontation experience without first conducting a brief comparative study as a
means of amplification. Since the mundus imaginalis is rooted in Islamic
tradition, Muhammad, the founder of Islam, seems a model analogue for
comparison.
At the age of 40, Muhammad periodically retreated to a cave at the
base of a mountain named Jabal Al-Nur located in modern day Saudi
Arabia where he would go to meditate. During one of his sojourns there,
Muhammad reported that he experienced a vision and heard a voice
which ordered him to recite. Muhammad subsequently identified the
voice as the angel Gabriel. Upon returning home, Muhammad was
shaken by his encounter and it was not without hesitation that he eventually resolved to accept the validity of his visions in the cave (Armstrong,
2002, p. 3). Jung too, at approximately the same age—Jung was 38—had a
vision. The vision occurred in 1913 and ostensibly foreshadowed the start
of World War I (Jung, 1961, p. 175). Another vision, and a series of vivid
dreams, predated the breakout of the war in August 1914. Jung proceeded
to write down his visions and fantasies while attempting to translate his
attendant emotions into images. Jung further explained the process in his
autobiography:
I wrote down the fantasies as well as I could, and made an earnest
effort to analyze the psychic conditions under which they had arisen. But I was able to do this only in clumsy language. First I formulated the things as I observed them, usually in “high-flown lan-
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guage,” for that corresponds to the style of the archetypes. (1961, p.
178)
In this passage, Jung was alluding to the prima materia of his fantasies
which would later congeal into The Red Book. The cave motif was also
present in Jung's first figurative descent into the unconscious:
I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears. Then I
let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave
way beneath my feet, and I plunged down into the dark depths. I
could not fend off a feeling of panic. But then, abruptly, at not too
great a depth, I landed on my feet in a soft, sticky mass. I felt great
relief, although I was apparently in complete darkness. After a
while my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, which was rather like
a deep twilight. Before me was the entrance to a dark cave [italics
added], in which stood a dwarf with a leathery skin, as if he were
mummified. (1961, p. 179)
The cave in fact is a symbol par excellence of the unconscious, and it is
not surprising that both individual’s visionary account, not unlike Plato,
mentioned a cave. An entire chapter in the Qur’an, Surah 18, employs the
cave symbol as its primary motif. Jung was well aware of the archetypal
symbolism of Surah 18, having observed that “This entire Surah is taken
up with a rebirth mystery. The cave is the place of rebirth, the secret cavity in which one is shut up in order to be incubated and renewed” (para.
240, CW9i, 1940/1950). Jung further suggested that Surah 18 means that:
Anyone who gets into that cave, that is to say into the cave which
everyone has in himself, or into the darkness that lies behind consciousness, will find himself involved in an—at first—unconscious
process of transformation. By penetrating in to the unconscious he
makes a connection with his unconscious contents. This may result
in a momentous change of personality in the positive or negative
sense. (1940/1950, CW9i, para. 241)
Jung was well aware of the uncanny parallels between his experience and
those of other historical visionary figures, to include Muhammad. For
instance, in the original transcription notes of The Red Book dated JanuToward A Science of Gnosis
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ary 26, 1924, Carey Baynes wrote the following to Jung:
There were various figures speaking, Elias, Father Philemon, etc.
but all appeared to be phases of what you thought ought to be
called “the master.” You were sure that the latter was the same who
inspired Buddha, Mani, Christ, Mahomet [italics added]—all those
who may be said to have communed with God. (2009, p. 213)
It seems that the cultural context combined with historical setting co-opts
the ego’s experience of the ‘other,’ and in this way, one's perspective significantly colors the subsequent interpretation of that experience, whether sacred or profane. In Muhammad's case, he encountered an angel in a
cave. For Jung on the other hand, he descended into a phantasmal realm
peopled by exotic biblical figures—Elijah and Salome—that best fit his
own personal mythology. A verse from the Gnostic book The Acts of Peter aptly illustrates this point: “I saw him in such a form as I was able” (as
cited in Corbin, 1998, p. 131). In any case, it seems that the spirit of the
depths, another term for the unconscious, expresses itself through the
contextual mouthpiece of the spirit of the times; not unlike Plato's idea of
anamnesis, of which Jung said “So it is with the individual images: they
need a context, and the context is not only a myth but an individual anamnesis” (1941/1959, CW9i, para. 319).
Active Imagination as Ta'wil
Corbin indicated that the word ta'wil etymologically means “to bring
back the data to their origin, to their archetype, in their donor” (1977, p.
53). He added that:
ta’wil is preeminently the hermeneutics of symbols, the ex-egisis, the
bringing out of hidden spiritual meaning. Without the ta’wil,
Suhrawardi’s Oriental Theosophy would not exist, nor any spiritual
phenomenon in general, namely Shi’ite gnosis, by which the meaning of Islam is transfigured. (1977, p. 53)
The word's meaning is comparable with the meaning of the word religion, which etymologically indicates a “linking back to the source” (Jung,
1951/1958, CW9i, para. 271). Similarly, Corbin viewed ta'wil, like his
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Muslim visionary predecessors, as a heirophanic operation. He also considered ta'wil to be a hermeneutic technique, a basic means to see
through the superposition of visionary realms described in Islamic cosmology and doctrine. One might then say that ta'wil is a process of seeing with
the totality of the soul rather than the liminality of the eyes. Viewed
through the lens of Jung’s psychology, ta'wil bears a striking resemblance
to his active imagination method, a type of reverie where “images have a
life of their own and that the symbolic events develop according to their
own logic” (Jung as cited in Chodorow, 1997, p. 45). It should be noted
that Corbin did not employ the term active imagination in exactly the
same way as Jung. Corbin viewed the active Imagination as an organ of
perception whereas Jung presented his method as more of a dialectic process. According to Corbin, “The intermediate world is accessible only to
the active Imagination, which is at the same time the founder of its own
universe and the transmuter of sensory data into symbols” (1977, p. 84).
In this sense, Corbin’s active Imagination seems inextricably linked to
ta’wil. The active imagination:
does not construct something unreal, but unveils the hidden reality;
its action is in short, that of ta’wil, the spiritual exegesis practiced
by all of the spirituals of Islam, whose special quality is that of alchemical meditation: to occultate the apparent, to manifest the hidden. (Corbin, 1977, p. 12)
Jung formulated his active imagination method while suffering from a
creative illness which coincided with his confrontation with the unconscious. Jung first alluded to the method, which he initially called spontaneous fantasy, as early as 1916. Of those fantasies, Jung said:
They usually have a more composed and coherent character and
often contain much that is obviously significant. Some patients are
able to produce fantasies at any time, allowing them to rise up
freely simply by eliminating critical attention. Such fantasies can
be used, though this particular talent is none too common. The
capacity to produce free fantasies can, however, be developed with
practice. The training consists first of all in systematic exercises for
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eliminating critical attention, thus producing a vacuum in consciousness. (as cited in Chodorow, 1997, p. 50)
Jung's description above marked his first attempt at articulating the
method he would later formulate into active imagination. However, it is
necessary to point out that as early as childhood, Jung had lucid hypnagogic experiences that were consistent with the characteristics of active
imagination (1961, p. 18).
One noteworthy similarity between active imagination and ta'wil is
the idea of personifying. Active imagination tends to personify the inner
images in a figurative way so that they may have a life of their own. The
anima appears not as an abstract idea, but rather as an archetypal person
that one may communicate with; or as Hillman has suggested “Where
imagination reigns, personifying happens” (1975, p. 17). Likewise,
Corbin said that the mundus imaginalis is populated by imaginal beings
to include angels. While accessing the mundus imaginalis, Suhrawardi
even claimed that he spoke with the angel Gabriel, not unlike Muhammad in the cave. Notwithstanding some contextual differences, one could
liken an angel to an archetype. In fact, Jung reasoned that “If angels, are
anything at all, they are personified transmitters of unconscious contents
that are seeking expression” (1938/1954, CW13, para. 108). In the aforesaid passage, Jung seemed to be describing the emergence of the archetype per se into a particular conscious manifestation. The chief function
of an angel in most theological and metaphysical traditions is that of a
messenger, that is to say, a transmitter of knowledge from the unconscious to consciousness. The late Jungian writer Walter Odajnyk offered
some similar insights:
From the point of view of Jungian psychology, angels are manifestations of the various characteristics and functions that belong to
the transpersonal archetype of the Self or are attributes projected
onto it by human beings, e.g., power, protection, intelligence, narcissism, pride, the source of life and death and of good and evil. As
messengers, they represent attempts on the part of the Self to convey information to ego consciousness that otherwise would not be
understood or apprehended. (2010)
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Active imagination, as conceived by Jung, could be interpreted as a form
of Western ta'wil; and one could argue that the phenomenology of Jung's
mundus archetypus is another way of describing the visionary experience of
the mundus imaginalis, albeit viewed within the tradition of medieval
alchemy and the more modern framework of analytical psychology. It
seems to me then that if Jung were an Imam, he unknowingly acquired
an orientation to ta'wil as an esoteric hermeneutic thereby discovering a
means to access the mundus imaginalis. One could therefore speculate
that ta'wil, not unlike active imagination, is a figurative key to the doors
of the intermediate world of Avicennian cosmology: the mundus imaginalis. This insight is consistent with Corbin’s contention that “The proper organ of access to this intermediate world is not to be found in any
sensory faculty, nor in the virtus intellectualis, but in the active Imagination” (1998, p. 124). Thus, both ta’wil and active imagination could be
viewed as a kind of visionary knowledge that enables the subject to engage directly with the interiority of his soul.
Active imagination apparently has the potential to transmute the psyche through the transcendent function, which is what occurs when the
tension of polarities produce a new psychic situation. Few people, particularly those with a western orientation, appreciate the meaning of active
imagination. Marie Louise Von Franz suggested that not only does active
imagination facilitate the individuation process, but allows one to turn
his consciousness “towards the events which happen on the middle plane,
on the events which evolve within your active imagination” (Von Franz
as cited in Raff, 2000, p. 24 ). Von Franz' choice of words—middle plane,
events, evolve—seem to describe in depth psychological terms the mundus imaginalis.
Both ta'wil and active imagination appear to belong to the same epistemological category, that is to say, they both are a type of analogical
knowledge. Human beings have the tendency to analogize when confronted with two separate experiences that are cognitively and linguistically related, albeit at an unconscious level. Regarding the importance of
analogy, Jung acknowledged that:
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Since analogy formation is a law which to a large extent governs the
life of the psyche, we may fairly conjecture that our—to all appearances—purely speculative construction is not a new invention, but
is prefigured on earlier levels of thought. (1951/1959, CW9ii, para.
414)
Furthermore, Corbin’s formulation of the mundus imaginalis based on
extant depth psychological material may represent an attempt to return to the root metaphors of human experience, which seem equivalent in a roundabout way to Jung’s archetypes. When people analogize
and compare, they are drawing from a priori patterns of the psyche.
These innate dispositions—the river beds of the soul—define the channels of psychic energy that flow into conscious awareness. Thus, the
human mind apparently has a natural propensity to link disparate
kinds of knowledge via analogy which is not at all different from the
process of mythologizing. The imagination operates via similar cognitive and linguistic pathways resulting in the formation of symbols. A
symbol, after all, is merely a metaphor, a necessary perspective that
arises from the vagaries of the mind. Speaking from the point of view
of cognitive science, Douglas Hofstadter described the process more
colloquially:
Mature human brains are constantly trying to reduce the complexity of what they perceive, and this means that they are constantly
trying to get unfamiliar, complex patterns made of many symbols
that have been freshly activated in concert to trigger just one familiar pre-existing symbol (or a very small set of them). (2007, p. 277)
Analogizing enables us to avoid those harsh “either-or” statements which
tend to lead to psychic fragmentation and subsequent disorientation. Instead, as with Jung’s transcendent function, we may synthesize a third
thing by analogy. Corbin even suggested that “The cognitive function of imagination provides the foundation for a rigorous analogical knowledge
permitting us to evade the dilemma of current rationalism, which gives
us only a choice between the two banal dualistic terms of either "matter"
or "mind"” (1964/1972, p. 7). In other words, metaphor may serve as an
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epistemological bridge allowing the observer to reach a higher order of
psychological awareness by employing analogy as a figurative stepping
stone. What I am describing resembles Hillman's notion of psychologizing—“the soul's root and native activity” (1975, p. 115). Hillman further
articulated that “psychologizing is not satisfied when necessary and sufficient conditions have been met or when, testability has been established.
It is satisfied only by its own movement of seeing through” (1975, p. 140).
In order to apprehend the activity concealed behind the phenomena,
one must introduce an archetypal idea in order to gaze behind the wizard's curtain just as Moses could only see God through the appearance of
the burning bush (Bible, Exodus 3:1-22). The burning bush was not a literal thing, but rather the archetypal means to see beyond the manifest
phenomena. Hillman further explained this point: “Without the idea of
the unconscious we could not see through behavior into its hidden unknowns. But we do not see the unconscious” (1975, p. 141). Not surprisingly given his influence on Hillman, Jung too alluded to the process of
psychologizing: “…looking, psychologically, brings about the activation
of the object; it is as if something were emanating from one's spiritual eye
that evokes or activates the object of one's vision” (as cited in Chodorow,
1997, p. 7). In other words, the way we see things changes them, and
when I use the word “way” I am referring to a psychological mode of perception. The unconscious therefore is not a literal thing, but a metaphor
of the imagination. Similarly, Corbin mused that there was an important
relationship between metaphor and imagination:
Active Imagination is the mirror par excellence, the epiphanic place
for the Images of the archetypal world. This is why the theory of the mundus imaginalis closely bound up with a theory of imaginative cognition and
of the imaginative function, which is a truly central, mediating function,
owing both to the median and the mediating position of the mundus imaginalis. The imaginative function makes it possible for all the universes to
symbolize with each other and, by way of experiment, it enables us to imagine that each substantial reality assumes forms that correspond to each
respective universe. (1964/1972, p. 7)
Hillman used a similar image to describe his own technique of
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(Bible, Exodus 3:1-22). The burning bush was not a literal thing, but rather the archetypal means to see beyond the manifest phenomena. Hillman further explained this point: “Without the idea of the unconscious
we could not see through behavior into its hidden unknowns. But we do
not see the unconscious” (1975, p. 141). Not surprisingly given his influence on Hillman, Jung too alluded to the process of psychologizing: “…
looking, psychologically, brings about the activation of the object; it is as
if something were emanating from one's spiritual eye that evokes or activates the object of one's vision” (as cited in Chodorow, 1997, p. 7). In other words, the way we see things changes them, and when I use the word
“way” I am referring to a psychological mode of perception. The unconscious therefore is not a literal thing, but a metaphor of the imagination.
Similarly, Corbin mused that there was an important relationship between metaphor and imagination:
Active Imagination is the mirror par excellence, the epiphanic place
for the Images of the archetypal world. This is why the theory of the
mundus imaginalis closely bound up with a theory of imaginative
cognition and of the imaginative function, which is a truly central,
mediating function, owing both to the median and the mediating
position of the mundus imaginalis. The imaginative function makes
it possible for all the universes to symbolize with each other and, by
way of experiment, it enables us to imagine that each substantial
reality assumes forms that correspond to each respective universe.
(1964/1972, p. 7)
Hillman used a similar image to describe his own technique of psychologizing:
Glass is the metaphor par excellence for psychic reality: it is itself
not visible , appearing only to be its contents, and the contents of
the psyche, by which placed within or behind glass, have been
moved from palpable reality to metaphorical reality, out of life and
into image...Glass is the concrete image of seeing through. (1975, p.
142)
Mirror and glass optimally symbolize the imaginal operation central to
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both Corbin and Hillman’s ideas, and one may best understand these ideas as ontological metaphors. Put a different way, one is using a known
concrete object to describe a partially unknown ontology based on the
object's physical properties. The metaphorical quality symbolizes or indirectly corresponds to two similar ideas: the mundus imaginalis and psychologizing. The apostle Paul apparently understood this insight when he
proclaimed, “We see through a glass darkly” (Bible, 1 Corinthians 13:12).
In the final analysis, both ta'wil and active imagination are ostensibly analogical activities that enable the observer to see through the dichotomy of subject and object by introducing a third thing that mediates
the former and the latter. Analogy deepens psychological awareness so
that one may access the suprasensory reality hidden within the image.
Citing the work of Suhrawardi, Corbin has pointed out that “the encounter with suprasensory reality can come about through a certain way of
reading a written text; it can come about from hearing a voice, without
the speaker being visible” (1977, p. 123).
Conclusion
Throughout this essay I have addressed a number of topics central to the
thesis of this paper, to include Corbin's mundus imaginalis, Jung's confrontation with the unconscious, the active imagination method as conceived by Jung, and the Islamic notion of ta'wil; as well as having examined the ways in which knowledge is discovered and subsequently organized by archetypal ideas. I also sought to explore the topics as viewed
from the perspective of an epistemology of images—an imaginal way of
knowing. Furthermore, I endeavored to show that Jung was not the first
person to employ active imagination as a practice, since Islamic mystics
were applying the hermeneutics of symbols long before the advent of analytical psychology. What I find most compelling is the ubiquitous presence of the same archetypal patterns in the areas I have discussed. One
need not be a trained analyst or scholar to discern similar motifs within
visionary experiences to include the topology of the mundus imaginalis,
Jung's confrontation with the unconscious, Suhrawardi's mystical experiences, and Muhammad's encounter with the angel.
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All of these ideas seem to converge on a central one, an idea that encapsulates the nature of knowledge as a whole. I am referring to the idea
of gnosis, which Jung studied exhaustively through the lens of Gnosticism between 1918 and 1926 (Jung, 1961, p. 200), and defined it as “a psychological knowledge whose contents derive from the unconscious” (1951/1959, CW9ii, para. 350). The Greek etymological root of
the word gnosis translates simply to knowledge, however, what gnosis
really amounts to, or so it seems to me, is the ontologization of
knowledge. The ontologization of knowledge is a difficult concept to define and in order to do so, I feel it necessary to be clear as I can only hypothesize, and one could just as well say the following: “knowledge is not
an abstraction derived in some way from sense-given percepts, but is an
ontological 'illumination' or assimilation of such percepts from 'within,'
or rather, since we may now say it, from the being above that we
are” (Bamford, p. XIX). Jung similarly observed that the psyche has “the
spontaneous capacity to produce images independently of sense perception” (1945/1948, CW9i, para. 393). Gnosis is a special kind of knowledge
that can transform one’s mode of being. In this vein, Corbin further indicated that gnosis “is knowledge that changes and transforms the knowing
subject” (Corbin as cited in Avens, 1984, p. 4). Thus, gnosis, viewed in
this light, is tantamount to a mode of knowing that is both subjective and
objective. For the observing subject then, gnosis apparently can pull the
outside world inward and to push the inside world outward so that the
microcosm is equilaterally nested within the macrocosm.
All things considered, gnosis may be best understood as knowledge
by presence. Knowledge by presence is not at all different from the philosopher Heidegger's idea of dasein or a sense of being present in the
world. Being presupposes knowledge, in fact, without an a priori dasein; a
means of knowing would not be possible. One could say that gnosis is the
knowledge of the soul and the imagination may be viewed as the spiritual
organ par excellence of the soul of presence. One need only turn to
Suhrawardi for further explanation:
In the course of human knowledge man must first make his inquiry
into his awareness of himself, then proceed from this step to what
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65
is above and beyond himself [the external world]. Thus, we say: the
fact that our souls apprehend the reality of themselves does not imply that the apprehension has come to them by a representation.
(Suhrawardi as cited in Yazdi, 1992, p. 94)
One could therefore say that first and foremost we simply are—dasein;
and I think that Descartes’ famous dictum would better reflect a more
accurate state of affairs if it read: sum ergo cogito—I am therefore I think.
What is primary then is presence, the very act of being. In this way one
could infer that presence is essence. Being presupposes thinking rather
than the converse.
I contend that modern man is indeed in search of a soul (1933), and
what man has ostensibly forgotten is that his soul was never lost but
merely buried beneath “a heap of broken images” (Eliot as cited in Edinger, 1972/1992, p. 47). We—particularly those of us with a western orientation—seldom consider that the world is merely a representation, an image, but that is exactly what it is. One may then conclude that the soul, as
it were, requires no representation beyond itself; the soul simply is. An
imaginal kind of knowledge may be able to return the soul to its original
status as a first principle—whether in the form one's own angel, or the
anima and animus— by means of active imagination, ta'wil, or any other
imaginal way of knowing. Knowledge of this order seems to point towards a true science of gnosis.
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Toward A Science of Gnosis